Tracy Dudzinski
You’ve probably heard about the turmoil going on here in Wisconsin, but most of the talk about our budget repair bill is being focused on collective bargaining rights. There are other things buried in the bill that scare the heck out of me, but hardly anyone is talking about them.
A provision in the repair bill would allow the Secretary of the Department of Health services to make changes to the Wisconsin Medicaid program without going to the full legislature. This is clearly a ploy to make it easier for the new governor to make cuts in the program without risking being voted down by legislators who think some or all of the proposed cuts are too drastic. The changes that could take place might be changes in eligibility guidelines, increased premiums and increased co-pays. Any one of those could be devastating to my family.
My husband and daughter are insulin-dependent diabetics. They are both on Badger Care (Wisconsin Medicaid), since I am the only member of my family who can work. I work 40-plus hours a week, but my direct care worker salary is not enough to pay the premiums for a family health insurance plan, let alone the co-pays and deductibles. If we lost our Badger Care, I am not sure what we would do. We would not be able to afford the insulin they need to inject so they can live. I suppose we would have to choose between getting their life-saving insulin and having a roof over our head, since there’s nothing else we can cut out of our already bare-bones budget.
There are a lot of us hard-working low-income people who cannot afford to buy health insurance – including probably the majority of the direct care workers I know. Some of them have more than one job and work part-time at each, or they work in home care and can’t rely on getting full-time caseloads most weeks, so they’re not offered the option to buy health insurance even if one of their employers has it. And for those of us fortunate enough to get steady full-time work, the insurance is so expensive we usually can’t afford it.
We’re already hanging on by a financial thread, so any change that made Badger Care less accessible would leave a lot of us stranded. If the state raises the income limit for participation to disqualify more of us, we’ll be left without insurance. If Badger Care premiums or co-pays are increased, we might not be able to pay for the gas we need to get to work. Some people would probably work fewer hours on purpose so they can qualify for coverage again, making them even poorer and making it harder for their clients to get the care they need. It is a vicious circle.
I am also worried for the people who are served by my home care company. What will happen to them? The people we care for, who are also Medicaid recipients, are already under-served. They are making it, but just barely. If the services they receive are cut or decreased, some might have to go without a bath, without grocery shopping, without transportation to doctor appointments. Will they die at home with no one to help? Continue reading »
We are delighted to have the Direct Care Alliance (DCA) as one of our partners in a recent grant award we received from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). First let me tell you something about the Cooperative Development Foundation (CDF). CDF is a national 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with a mission to promote awareness of the cooperative business model and encourage the growth and expansion of cooperative businesses in both urban and rural settings. We already are working to promote development of cooperatives that meet the needs of senior citizens living in rural communities. With this USDA grant, we will expand that work and partner with DCA to focus on home care cooperatives in rural communities.
